Conventional home type television receivers, they are equipped with remote controllers. The function of this remote controller is to remotely control various functions of this home type television receiver. As such a remote controlling function, for instance, a power switch of the television receiver is turned ON/OFF. Further, a plurality of channel selection keys are provided on the remote controller, and television broadcasting stations are allocated to the respective channel selecting keys, so that labels indicative of the channel numbers of the relevant broadcasting stations which have been allocated to the respective channel selecting keys, are attached to the corresponding channel selecting keys. Thus, the channel selecting operations are carried out in accordance with the attached labels. In portable type television receivers, since the size of the entire TV receiver is rather small as compared with the home type TV receiver and a larger number of function keys are not so readily provided on the portable TV receiver, a remote controller is very useful.
However, as it is very common to transport such a portable TV receiver in an automobile, there are great differences in receivable TV broadcasting stations. In such a case, if a so-called "auto-preset" function (i.e., function capable of presetting a receivable TV station) is equipped in the main body of the portable TV receiver, the above-described problem may be solved to some extent. However, there is still a difficulty in a remote controller in that the TV broadcasting stations must be newly allocated to the respective channel selecting keys and moreover labels indicative of the newly allocated channel numbers are required to be attached to the respective channel selecting keys.
Also, there is another problem that since the portable TV receiver is normally operated by the built-in battery, if the remote control signal receiving circuit of the remote controller is operated when no TV program is watched, useless power consumption may occur.
Furthermore, since the size of the entire portable television receiver is rather small, no channel selecting key for directly designating TV channels is provided in this portable TV receiver. Alternatively only two set keys are provided to increase/decrease the frequencies of the channels. As to this two-key channel selecting method, there are several methods whereby a preset channel is set upwardly or downward, a TV channel frequency is continuously increased/decreased, and so on. However, there is no way to select one channel selecting method to other channel selecting methods.